Human Is the New Black

This morning I woke up with this little quotation from Trust Agents running through my head: “Human is the new black.”

In case you don’t know, Trust Agents is a great little book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.  If you follow Chris and Julien closely on their blogs and on twitter, you’ve probably already read most of the book one tweet, one blog post and one newsletter at a time over the last few years.  Buy it anyway.  It’s still worth it.

But back to my original point.  It seems like no matter what time we live in or what our job is, we spend half of our existence trying to manage, organize or undo the sticky, gooey condition of being human; and we spend the other half trying to regain or make sure we don’t lose the indefinable, illogical qualities that define our humanity.  So much of what we do seems to require this careful balance between the squishy art of being human and the cold logic of managing the complexity around us with systems.

As a species, we strive to explore the unknown, see the unseen, and understand the unknowable.  Yet we also seek comfort in ritual, familiarity and simple truths such as knowing that the sun will rise every morning.  Life is very fragile and yet also very resilient.  It is nearly impossible to really understand another person; yet history repeats itself because, as a species, we are very predictable.

Ever since The Cluetrain Manifesto was published about a decade ago (and probably before that), “new marketing” has been focused on the interactions between individuals rather than the reactions of groups.  Mass marketing was about understanding a market segment and repeating a message enough times until, eventually, some number of people internalized that message and bought your product.

New marketing is about understanding, not a market segment, but a single consumer and building a community of customers who each become a living, breathing advertisement for your company.

The trouble is that the art of bring human doesn’t scale well.  How can a company of any size use this model?  Well, we have figured that out too.  There are systems and tools we can use to automate the ability to maintain and build our network.  There are companies who specialize in doing all of the lead generation and nurturing for you so that you don’t have to think about it.

The problem is that there is no system or company that can replace this completely.  As a company, you have to make sure that you don’t try to outsource and systematize your humanness.  You have to integrate it into everything you do from the inception of feature in product management through the end of the sales cycle and the ongoing support you provide to your customers.  You can’t inject new marketing techniques into an old business structure and expect it to succeed.  You have to tear down the old structures and rebuild them.

The point of all of this is just a reminder and an encouragement not lose sight of what makes us all human as we market, sell and conduct our business.  The trick is to create repeatable systems for marketing, sales and conducting our business; but not to let those systems control us.  Remember not to lose sight of the fact that “Human is the new black.”

photo credit, winnie’s human